Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary

By Carrie Noland

One of the most influential choreographers of the twentieth century, Merce Cunningham is known for introducing chance to dance. Far too often, however, accounts of Cunningham’s work have neglected its full scope, focusing on his collaborations with the visionary composer John Cage or insisting that randomness was the singular goal of his choreography. In this book, the first dedicated to the complete arc of Cunningham’s career, Carrie Noland brings new insight to this transformative artist’s philosophy and work, providing a fresh perspective on his artistic process while exploring aspects of his choreographic practice never studied before.
Examining a rich and previously unseen archive that includes photographs, film footage, and unpublished writing by Cunningham, Noland counters prior understandings of Cunningham’s influential embrace of the unintended, demonstrating that Cunningham in fact set limits on the role chance played in his dances. Drawing on Cunningham’s written and performed work, Noland reveals that Cunningham introduced variables before the chance procedure was applied and later shaped and modified the chance results. Chapters explore his relation not only to Cage, but also Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, James Joyce, and Bill T. Jones. Ultimately, Noland shows that Cunningham approached movement as more than “movement in itself,” and that his work enacted archetypal human dramas. This remarkable book will forever change our appreciation of the choreographer’s work and legacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jan 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9780226541389

Book preview

Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham

After the Arbitrary

Carrie Noland

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Neil Harris Endowment Fund, which honors the innovative scholarship of Neil Harris, the Preston and Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago. The fund is supported by contributions from the students, colleagues, and friends of Neil Harris.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-54110-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-54124-2 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-54138-9 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226541389.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Noland, Carrie, 1958– author.

Title: Merce Cunningham: after the arbitrary / Carrie Noland.

Description: Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019013824 | ISBN 9780226541105 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226541242 (pbk) | ISBN 9780226541389 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Cunningham, Merce—Criticism and interpretation. | Cunningham, Merce—Sources. | Modern dance—United States. | Choreography.

Classification: LCC GV1785.C85 N65 2019 | DDC 792.8092 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013824

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction

(1)  Recycling the Readymade: Marcel Duchamp and the Rendez-Vous in Walkaround Time

(2)  Summerspace: The Body in Writing

(3)  Nine Permanent Emotions and Sixteen Dances: Drama in Cunningham

(4)  Passion in Slow Motion: Suite for Five and the Photographic Impulse

(5)  Bound and Unbound: The Reconstruction of Crises

(6)  The Ethnics of Vaudeville, the Rhythms of Roaratorio

(7)  Buddhism in the Theatre

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Names and Terms

Dances and Films by Merce Cunningham

Writings by Merce Cunningham

Plates

Introduction

You are standing on a street corner waiting for a friend, he is late or you think he is late, your impatience grows because he does not come, you see everyone and everything in a not-relation, it is not the person you await. Finally, he arrives, and you find he’s not late at all, your anxiety has been for more nervousness.

Stand on the same street corner waiting again, but without anxiety about when the errand will be accomplished. This is theatre! Visually aware, you see differently, that the store fronts are different as different people stand looking into the windows, that, without any intention of being self-expressive, each person is extraordinarily so. Each action as it happens and you are aware of it, is absorbing. It doesn’t make much difference whether your friend arrives on time or late. You have been a spectator in the audience using your faculties watching the players in action.

Merce Cunningham, 1957¹

In this brief anecdote, set in the second-person you, Merce Cunningham exposes what I believe to be the heart of the project he pursued throughout his career. Immediately establishing an intimacy with his audience—"You are standing on a street corner"—he evokes the elements of a developing aesthetic that would lead him from coin tosses and numerical calculations to the combinatorial complexities of his animated computer program DanceForms. Nowhere in this passage (or in the Lecture-Demonstration from which it is drawn) does Cunningham mention chance operations, although he had already been employing coin tosses to produce random sequences of dance movement for six years. Nor does he discuss the independence of dance from music or the decentering of the stage, although he was developing these aspects of his practice at the time. Instead, he points us directly to what is arguably one of his greatest preoccupations, one that has seldom been examined in the critical literature on Cunningham, and one that might even seem to run against the grain of that literature—namely, his preoccupation with connections, bonds, and human relationships. Against a background of scholarship decrying his posthumanism, his aesthetics of indifference, his abstraction of the corporeal, and his refusal of meaning,² I maintain, on the contrary, that his dances contain a plethora of moments in which archetypal human dramas are staged, desire and interest are multiplied, the human body is highly particularized, and gestures are saturated with meaning and affect.

In a sense, though, it would be false to oppose these two sets of propositions, for they are both equally valid in Cunningham’s case. Cunningham wanted to create a world in which detachment is tributary to—and perpetuated in—relations. Not-relation—as evoked in the passage above—is not exactly detachment but rather the state of mind in which one privileged attachment cancels out all the rest ("it is not the person you await). The goal, Cunningham implies, is to be able to establish a relation with anyone and anything. Therefore, apprehending the self-expressive[ness] of the players is not exactly getting attached again but rather entering a state in which not-relation" gives way to a kind of generalized relationality—by which I mean a seemingly limitless potential for relation to occur.³ When anyone (and anything) can become the center of interest, that interest might develop into a stronger attachment and perhaps, eventually, a constraining bond. Yet at the same time, when anyone can become a center of interest, that anyone is also eminently replaceable by anyone else. As Cunningham shows in the anecdote above, what you thought you wanted you didn’t want that much after all. It is not that you don’t have desires, or that bonds don’t inevitably form, but rather that the interval between looking and desiring can be extended, that bonds can be loosened when attention is diffused. Cunningham works at the edge between relation and nonrelation. That is, his methods (chance and otherwise) aim to rupture the habitual relations we forge between movements (and between movements and meanings), not to reveal movement in some idealized essence (movement in itself), but to exhibit the ambiguity of movement, to expose the multiple directions it might take. In this unstable space of the stage, Cunningham’s choreography suggests that desire is always haunted by its disappearance, a specific body is always haunted by its abstraction, and the affirmation of meaning is always threatened by its loss.

One of my primary arguments in this book is that despite what has been said and written about Cunningham, chance operations were not his only or even his primary compositional technique, and the randomization of relations was not his only or primary goal. Among the hundreds of pages of choreographic notes Cunningham left to the New York Public Library of Performing Arts, there are in fact very few mentions of chance operations. Instead, the word procedure appears repeatedly near the top of the page, under which we almost invariably find a formula—throw for . . . a) together or b) separately—intended to generate encounters (or not) between two or more dancers on the stage or in the performance space.⁴ For instance, the Procedure page from the choreographic notes for Summerspace (1958; plate 1) reveals that the possibility of an encounter between dancers was integrated into the chance procedure itself. In this instance at least, the duets between dancers were inspired not by some intention on Cunningham’s part to have particular dancers express a particular relation to each other, but rather by the fact that his coin tosses ended up directing two dancers to arrive at the same spot at the same time.⁵ Summerspace is composed of a set of chance-derived trajectories, a series of paths that the dancers follow to cross the stage as if they were individuals passing each other in the street on their way to a predetermined destination. It is entirely by accident, then, that two or more trajectories cross, that a spatial encounter takes place. Yet this spatial encounter, a kind of objet trouvé, offers the choreographer the opportunity to compose a duet; and that duet, once performed by dancers, suggests an encounter of more than a spatial kind.

Far from avoiding such moments of encounter and contact, Cunningham devised all sorts of ways of inciting them. Moreover, his objective was not always to suppress the theatrical or expressive tension generated by the encounter; at various times in his career, he placed theatricality and expressivity at the heart of his choreographic project. Cunningham was known to have built dances on the relations between individuals he observed, relations that preexisted the choreographic process. For Neighbors, a dance choreographed in 1991, he focused on tensions among his lead dancers, playing them out across a series of duets.⁶ Thirty years earlier, in a dance called Crises (the subject of chapter 5), he had already mobilized the tension he observed among company members as a thematic and motivating element. The testimony of his dancers—as well as careful study of the dances themselves—provides persuasive evidence that throughout his career, Cunningham explored the vicissitudes of human relationships for dramatic ends. Yet with very few exceptions, his critics have followed point by point what he repeatedly stated in his recorded declarations: that he was not interested in relationships, not interested in expression, not interested in drama, not interested in plot.⁷

Since his death in 2009, however, a plethora of materials have become more readily available to the public. His archive—containing the Choreographic Records (notes taken during the creation, filming, or reconstruction of a dance), videos of performances and rehearsals, reviews, and photographs—has been transferred to the Jerome Robbins Collection, where it can be consulted with permission from the Merce Cunningham Trust. In addition, dance companies licensed to reconstruct individual works may have access to the Dance Capsules, digitized packages containing information on select dances, through the Trust’s website. As a result, dances that have been out of the active repertory for years are now being performed all over the world, thus providing audiences with a broader view of his choreographic range. Films of performances believed lost are being unearthed.⁸ And finally, the passage of time itself has afforded scholars a healthy degree of critical distance. My book is the first to integrate into a fuller account of Cunningham’s choreographic practice the wealth of these new resources as well as information gained from interviews conducted with former Merce Cunningham Dance Company members and attendance at rehearsals of two recent dance reconstructions (Crises [1960] and Winterbranch [1964]). I scrutinize in particular the process Cunningham developed to make his dances, the procedures he invented to treat movement material that was rarely as neutral as he purported it to be.

The procedures Cunningham devised did indeed produce unexpected sequences (what he called continuities),⁹ but these were often placed in the service of creating not simply unconnectedness but also, and somewhat paradoxically, togetherness.¹⁰ As he suggests in the Lecture-Demonstration of 1957, anything and anyone can meet—and this, he exclaims, is theatre! His version of theatre is one that establishes relationality as a kind of milieu, to evoke Giorgio Agamben’s term. For Agamben, the milieu proper to the human condition is communicability. The communicative essence of human beings, he writes, is based on the fact of being together.¹¹ A human being is characterized by a susceptibility to being-in-relation, entering-into-connection. Keeping in mind that a stage is specifically a framed space in which persons relate, it could be said that any choreographer inevitably creates a milieu in which moving bodies experience and perform the fact of being together. Cunningham is no exception. In fact, if we look closely at both his procedures and the dances that result from them, it becomes clear that discovering new configurations, new spatial—and by extension affective—relations, is part of his project. That is, he aims not only to rid himself of his tastes, habits, and desires—the already fixed and codified relations between gestures and meanings, people and people, and people and things—to arrive at that "which is not the product of my will";¹² he also works to multiply opportunities for contact, encounter, and continuity, and in that way to invest all aspects of whatever scene with an affective charge. The world in its entirety, Cunningham seems to be saying, is filled with multiples of Charles Baudelaire’s Passante, a figure who offers the possibility of a liaison to establish, a story to unravel, a duet to dance, or a work to sign.

In sum, Cunningham does not always attempt to eliminate the germs of a plot, nor does he suppress the affective and erotic overtones of the physical contacts that occur between his dancers. On the contrary, he sometimes seems to welcome these contacts, these hints of a plot—especially if they are the result of encounters governed by chance. To return to the Lecture-Demonstration of 1957, we might read the allusion to a mode of attention that accords interest to anything and anybody as Cunningham’s way of evoking the philosophy of Zen Buddhism as it was received and celebrated by his partner, John Cage, during the 1950s. Yet we might also associate this mode of dispersed and nonhierarchical attention with the ideas in vogue during the postwar period—the all-over painting of Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg as well as the open field poetry of Charles Olson. But in the anecdote cited above, the state of mind that transforms everything into a possible relation, that saturates with interest all elements of the scene, and that allows for emergence or becoming is linked instead to theatre. During this same period, Cage was also thinking about theatre in similar terms: Theater takes place all the time wherever one is, he wrote in 45′ for a Speaker; and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.¹³ But if Cage’s notion of theatre was informed by the Zen teachings of D. T. Suzuki, Cunningham indicated in another Lecture-Demonstration of the same year that his model of theatre had an explicitly theatrical precedent—not an epic theatre of archetypes such as that favored by Martha Graham but another theatre of a very specific kind:

[People are] waiting on the corner for the light to change. But this is not stillness, since we are usually agitated about waiting. But occasionally we see someone who appears to be just waiting, like an acorn waiting that may some day be an oak. It is the heroic position to wait—to acquiesce to the moment you are in (because it is the most difficult thing in life it is granted this high reward).

The plays of Checkov [sic] are full of this, and I suspect that’s one of the things that make it difficult for Americans to present them well. There are many scenes where the characters just sit, with little or no conversation.¹⁴

To be sure, the discourse that Cunningham and Cage promulgated during their lifetime would discourage a spectator or critic from seeking a traditional theatrical plot—romantic, realist, or otherwise—in their works. Yet Cunningham’s allusion to Chekhov in 1957 suggests that two decades after performing in The Cherry Orchard while a student at the Cornish School in Seattle, the choreographer was still finding in Chekhov—or more precisely, in Chekhov’s approach to waiting—a theatrical model for choreography. Waiting on stage creates a pause in the action, an interval separating one monologue from the next, one phrase from the next. Theatre, at least as Cunningham defines it here, consists in a series of such pauses, a choreography in which the momentum of desire is paused, or stilled. During this interval in which nothing happens, the narrative expectations of the audience are frustrated. Cunningham remarks that it is specifically this type of interval that American audiences have a hard time observing on the stage. But without it, he suggests, there is no opportunity for something to emerge, no opportunity for the observer to acquiesce to, or become conscious of, the possibilities (in the acorn) not seen before.

One of the paradoxes of Cage and Cunningham’s adoption of Suzuki’s teachings is that instead of de-dramatizing the world’s hustle and bustle, Zen Buddhism—as they put it to work practically—tends to charge with dramatic emphasis everything they see or hear. It would not be far-fetched to claim that all the philosophers and artists dear to Cage and Cunningham—Suzuki, Mallarmé, and Duchamp, but also Chekhov, Thoreau, Stein, Joyce, and Rauschenberg—exert an appeal precisely because they allow for each and every thing to be a source of interest. The detachment Cunningham proposes in the street anecdote—standing on the same street corner waiting again—or in the passage on Chekhov—acquiesce to the moment you are in—is realized by the creation of a state of generalized cathexis, not a blanket indifference. However, let us note that the theatrical vocabulary Cunningham employs in the Lecture-Demonstration (spectator; players; audience) presupposes the presence of some sort of framing device. The actors, he tells us, are framed by store windows and doors, which also change (the store fronts are different as different people stand looking into the windows). These instances of fenestration serve to spotlight or bring into relief. That is, Cunningham’s theatrical mode of vision inevitably reestablishes a hierarchy of investments, a multiplication but also a selection of centers. Art may convince the viewer that theater takes place all the time, as Cage maintains, but that convincing takes specific forms. Cunningham’s conceit in the Lecture-Demonstration of 1957 is that all the world is a stage, an endless flow of equally valid readymades or centers of attention. But, just as Marcel Duchamp had to inscribe his objects to make them readymades, so, too, Cunningham must leave his mark on the aleatory encounter by placing it in relief.¹⁵

As if to convince us how easily the street can turn into a mise-en-scène, Cunningham actually staged the anecdote that opens this introduction in a section of Antic Meet, a dance of ten sections choreographed in 1958. Social, the sixth section, is an ensemble piece in which five dancers proceed slowly across and around the stage, encountering one another in seemingly arbitrary patterns, sometimes locking elbows but without exchanging glances. Each dancer wears a pair of dark sunglasses, indicating either the sophistication of cocktail partygoers (David Vaughan’s interpretation) or the isolation of people on the street (mine).¹⁶ (In his original outline of Antic Meet, contained in a letter to Rauschenberg, Cunningham explicitly calls Social a street scene.)¹⁷ However, beyond the incessant circulating, there is nothing in the dancers’ movement style to suggest the quotidian act of locomotion. Legs are turned out; feet are pointed; backs are straight; arabesques are extended. This is recognizably dance, a "street scene," not the street itself. The monotony of walking down a street, however, is captured by the repetitious nature of the arm movements executed by all the dancers throughout the entire sequence: first one curved arm lifts and opens to the side, then the other curved arm lifts and opens to the side, as though each member of the scene were creating—framing and protecting—his or her own personal space. Of course, the stage itself serves as a frame, a rectangular volume with a frontal orientation. When two dancers meet, our eye is attracted to them, especially if they advance toward downstage or, as at the end, remain alone near the wings. At this climactic point in the dance, Cunningham even adds a sudden clasp just before the exit, confirming the bond between the two dancers, a woman and a man, and thus evoking the intimations of a plot. (See figure 0.1.)

0.1

Social from Antic Meet (1958). Remy Charlip, Carolyn Brown, Viola Farber, and Marilyn Wood. Photograph by Keith McGrary (1958). Reprinted with permission from the Merce Cunningham Trust. © Merce Cunningham Trust. All rights reserved.

Accordingly, Social captures less the quotidian movement of the street—the precise vocabulary of walking or stopping at a street corner—than the mode of quotidian circulation—the blocking of life on the street, the choreography of spatial relationships. The isolation and inwardness characterizing the dancers of Social seem to extend to all of Cunningham’s dancers; it is as though for Cunningham, choreography were simply a variation on the act of passing by punctuated by moments of contact and interaction. Ultimately, the spatial relationships of the street (and not the movement vocabulary of the street) are what interest him. However, to become art, to become expression, these spatial relationships must be seized within the frame of a window, door, proscenium, lens, or screen. That is, the potential relations he sees emerging before his eyes must arise before the spectator’s eyes as well. Otherwise, these relations, generative of theatre, exist for Cunningham alone. Thus, from one angle, all action is already theatre, and all passersby are already actors; but from another, actions and passersby are simply life itself. To make theatre out of life requires more than simply changing our mode of attention, adopting a stance of passive acquiescence to what is. To make theatre out of life, the choreographer must make his theatre our theatre. Something must happen after the arbitrary to make action into dance.

Capturing (or curating) the moment when not-relation resolves into a general and radical relationality might seem to be a counterintuitive project. Yet Cunningham was not alone in attempting to work within this relational space. As earlier scholars have argued, his project was influenced by many other artists, writers, and thinkers interested in disturbing and ramifying connections through methods of fragmentation, collage, permutation, and seriality.¹⁸ In this book, I do not ignore these influences—from Mallarmé to Cage—but I cast them in a new light. My main objective is to reveal how each one nourished Cunningham’s theatrical imagination.¹⁹ Duchamp’s influence was far-reaching and touched many elements of Cunningham’s aesthetic; but most crucially, it was the artist’s recasting of chance encounters as rendez-vous that encouraged Cunningham to imagine affect—and even eroticism—in the aleatory encounter, or trouvaille. Robert Rauschenberg, to give another example, was highly valued as a collaborator because his collage and multimedia practices indicate how the juxtaposition of seemingly arbitrary items can create not only unforeseen connections but also an internally coherent set of symbols.²⁰ And finally, James Joyce’s aesthetic of atomization as displayed in Finnegans Wake was central to Cunningham’s development; Joyce’s disarticulation and permutation of culturally constructed continuities—from words into syllables, identities into words—offered a model for how gestural meanings could also circulate. In each case, Cunningham approached his modernist influences through the lens of a performer, someone who had spent his life onstage.

In a manuscript note of 1961, Cunningham wrote that Rauschenberg possessed three instincts that the theater can absorb like water. These three instincts are of course also his own:

One, the quality of the mysterious, or a poetic ambiguity set up as to what the object was. Two, a practicality—the gift to change something, by reduction or addition, or completely, depending on the immediate circumstances that the theater keeps providing. And three, a humaneness in respect to the individual dancer as to what he feels the dancer looks like, what makes that person and body interesting to his eye and how to treat it visually.²¹

In the chapters that follow, I return to each of these elements of the theatrical, linking them to Cunningham’s gestural semiotics (a semiotics of ambiguity); his relational ontology (an ontology of the combinatorial); and his aesthetic humanism (an aesthetic attentive to how each person is self-expressive—and extraordinarily so). Despite his disavowal of intention, he in fact demonstrated a high degree of sensitivity to the kind of sequencing that could make a chain of movements into a dance spectacle, modifying the order of phrases or entire sections to maximize their dramatic potential. Cunningham was far removed from an Yvonne Rainer, for instance, who declared in her 1965 No Manifesto an implacable resistance to every theatrical artifice: No to spectacle. . . . No to moving or being moved.²² My goal is to reorient the critical discourse on Cunningham by privileging those aspects of his practice indebted to specific forms of theater as well as to the notion of theatricality itself. To think of his work as a theatre of relations, rather than a choreography of discontinuities, is to redirect the critical emphasis toward a different hermeneutics, one based on the assumption that in the process of making his dances, crucial decisions were made both before and after the throw of the die. As opposed to John Cage, who claimed to refrain from reworking the solutions he was given by the Book of Changes, or the I Ching, Cunningham developed many ways of selecting, framing, and highlighting what he found most interesting visually and kinetically (what makes that person and body interesting to his eye and how to treat it visually). Even the factors he chose to submit to chance speak volumes about his interest in spatial relationships and their tendency to solicit affect and drama.

One of the larger implications of my argument—that Cunningham’s dances contain and represent relations (even if built on arbitrary encounters)—is that we can now begin to interpret his dances as meaningful, that is, as productive of meanings that are not simply our own business but instead anchored in the dance text, so to speak.²³ We no longer must be afraid of imposing meanings on them because the filaments of an interpretation can be discerned in the ways in which Cunningham transforms his chance-derived sequences to produce a coherent choreography. Most of us recognize that a Cunningham dance is all-of-a-piece; it is organized by an eye in search of resonant patterns. His notes (and my attempts to decipher them) merely reveal to what a great extent the elements of each dance are indeed organized—both before and after the use of chance. Cunningham was a man of the theatre. He did not simply stand on a street corner and wait.

Yet virtually all scholars have neglected the importance of theatre to Cunningham’s work—which is surprising given that his first formation, his earliest professional training, was in the theater. During his adolescence, he took dance classes with Maude Barrett, who taught him tap, ballroom, and folk dances of many varieties.²⁴ (He never lost his taste for these more popular forms.) It is odd, and perhaps a sign of the tight control discourses on the avant-garde have exerted on the study of dance, that the impact of Cunningham’s early training has not yet garnered greater attention. Outside a few loose allusions in early reviews, there has been very little reflection on how the techniques and the specific routines he learned early on might have remained within his body in the form of kinesthetic memories, a resource from which to draw movement ideas. Indeed, the bulk of current research conducted on kinesthetic memory, the persistence of rhythmic patterns and stylistic mannerisms in later ways of moving, has focused on dancers considered ethnic in origin.²⁵ Yet there is no reason to suppose that the memory of certain rhythmic patterns and steps did not also remain in Cunningham’s body throughout his lifetime, inflecting his movement choices even in the later years when he selected movements to be entered into the menu (the movement gamut) of the DanceForms software program.

Received ideas concerning Cunningham’s aesthetics—his neutrality, his impersonality, his lack of theatricality—continue to play an inordinate role in his critical reception. Ever since Jill Johnston famously wrote in her review for the Village Voice that his dances are all about movement, and that he embodies the shift from representation to the concentration on materials. . . . Each movement means only itself, there has been a strong tendency to disregard the roles he played, the ethnic traditions from which he drew, and the more complex hermeneutics his dances require.²⁶ Clive Barnes lamented in 1970 that Cunningham not only spurns any literary quality, but is also beginning to spurn even any dramatic quality.²⁷ And in 2011, Susan Leigh Foster summed up the general consensus: in Cunningham, dance movement, now seen as entirely separate from music, present[s] physical effects that [a]re determinedly separated from connotations of the spiritual or the emotional.²⁸ The French response to Cunningham has also retained a stubborn emphasis on antitheatricality: in Danse contemporaine et théâtralité, for instance, Michèle Febvre suggests that Cunningham deplored the fact that movement is expressive beyond any intention; he sought a new order of the body, a transparent body . . . relieved of the pathos of modern dance.²⁹ For Laurence Louppe, Cunningham’s dance doesn’t communicate; his project consisted in eliminating affects, and he brought to the stage only gestures "the theatrical intensity of which had been evacuated."³⁰

If we look more closely, however, we see that what Cunningham set aside was not theatre but rather linear narration, the plotline based on the classic dramatic arc: development, crisis, dénouement. His stripping-down of the theatrical left many resources in place: mime, gesture, music, lighting, costume, props, décor. For him, the presence of human beings on the stage guaranteed—without recourse to anything else—the framing of these human beings, and thus to some extent their spectacularization. As Martin Puchner states succinctly, live performance is innately theatrical.³¹ Or in Cunningham’s words, I do not understand how a human can do something that is abstract. Everything a human does is expressive in some way of that human.³²

The choreographic inflection to Cunningham’s appropriation of Zen Buddhism places him in an interesting position vis-à-vis Cage, for whom a lack of relation and an absence of expression are primary. Cunningham seems to have believed that the reprisal of relationships and continuities is inevitable, not something added to human nature but nature itself: as he wrote in 1952, "We don’t, it seems to me, have to worry ourselves about providing relations and continuities, [for] they cannot be avoided. They are the nature of things."³³ I want to stress this fundamental difference between Cage and Cunningham, one I will explore repeatedly in the chapters to follow. As opposed to Cunningham, Cage—at least for most of his life—did not claim that relationships are our nature, that they cannot be avoided. His aversion to relation as a compositional and ontological principle is based on his suspicion with respect to Western theories of harmony; he wished to liberate musical notes from intervallic relationships so that they could be heard afresh, in and of themselves.³⁴ It was in order to hear sounds outside their relations to other sounds that he turned toward the larger and less ordered world of noise. In an interview with the composer Daniel Charles, Cage presents relations as something we invent, then, forgetting we invented them, take for granted as inevitable. The relationship, he insists, "comes afterward."³⁵

Arguably, the belatedness of relation is what Cunningham, too, aims to show: the coin or die is thrown, the continuity is forged, and the relation emerges afterward. Yet at the same time Cunningham maintains, as we have seen, that relations and continuities . . . cannot be avoided. They are the nature of things. Clearly, he works to suspend the conventional, seemingly inevitable connections, the chains that too often follow dancers’ feet around.³⁶ However, his goal is not to deny relationality but to extend it; he does so by interrupting the momentum of our habitual trajectory so that other, less prescribed encounters might occur.³⁷ Some people seem to think that it is inhuman and mechanistic to toss pennies in creating a dance, Cunningham wrote in 1952. But the feeling I have when I compose in this way is that I am in touch with a natural resource far greater than my own personal inventiveness could ever be, much more universally human than the particular habits of my own practice, and organically rising out of common pools of motor impulses.³⁸

Finally, Cunningham’s insistence on common pools of motor impulses leads us to the second crucial difference between him and Cage. Cage developed his Zen Buddhist aesthetic in the context of musical composition, or, more broadly, in the context of the aural universe. But Cunningham was not working with sounds. His medium was the human body. Therefore, his palette was drawn from a set of physical movements capable of being performed by a trained dancer whose muscular and skeletal limitations are those of an acculturated human body (and universal only in that way). On the one hand, the human body is like any other artistic medium: it can be articulated into discrete units, and these units can be formed into new and unexpected combinations. On the other, the human body is utterly different from any other medium employed in the arts. A human body is one with a human person who feels, who is affected, who emotes.³⁹ As opposed to sounds, the movements of a human person cannot be sequenced in any order whatsoever, nor can they be entirely divorced from the socially constructed projects in which they gain meaning. Moreover, in contrast to sounds, the movements of the human body are controlled by reflexes and implicated in a host of acquired gestural routines. They drag along with them complex histories—cultural, technical, and personal—that Cunningham sought not only to short-circuit but also to exploit. The expressiveness of the human body, its ability to convey meaning, was never something he wanted to suppress or avoid; on the contrary, it was something he hoped to surprise. His major and long-lasting concerns were the following, as he listed them for his students in a Workshop in Flexibility of 1974: (1) to discover by chance means the multiple possibilities in movement as to what follows what, and (2) to learn how these possibilities, arrived at by accident, might generate drama among human beings on the stage. Or as he put it: How does this—a new possibility of sequencing—relate to ‘relationships’ or seem inherent in a ‘plot’?⁴⁰ Here, Cunningham explicitly asks his students to make the leap from movement to meaning. In the pages that follow, I argue that he asked his public—albeit somewhat less explicitly—to make that leap as well.⁴¹ He consistently associated his experiments in random sequencing (the creation of new continuities) with the production of alternative relations—among art forms, among human beings in real life, and among dancers on stage. To his mind, these relations could emerge only after the arbitrary, that is, after the coin was tossed or the die was thrown. But once these relations emerged, and once they were performed, he was confident that they would be self-expressive—and extraordinarily so.

My first chapter focuses on the paradoxical relation between the arbitrary and the motivated, the unexpected and its repetition, as it plays out in Cunningham’s Walkaround Time of 1968. Like Marcel Duchamp, Cunningham knew that contingency is solicited rather than suppressed by repetition, because repetition always has a performative dimension. When Duchamp sought to counteract his own congealed habits (his training and taste⁴²) by employing chance procedures, then congealing their aleatory